Among the voices making this case is Professor Sankar Prasad Rath of IIT Kanpur, a National Teacher Awardee whose career has centred on building foundational clarity in students rather than encouraging shortcut-driven learning.
The Core Concern: Speed Versus Depth
The rise of artificial intelligence tools — from instant answer generators to AI-powered tutoring apps — has fundamentally changed how students approach problem-solving. A question that once required working through a concept step by step can now be answered in seconds. While this has clear benefits for accessibility and efficiency, educators like Professor Rath argue it also carries a hidden risk: students may get the right answer without ever building the conceptual understanding needed to arrive at it independently.
This distinction matters more in technical and scientific disciplines, where a shaky grasp of fundamentals can surface later — in advanced coursework, competitive exams, or real-world problem-solving — long after an AI tool has moved on to the next query. A professor's job, in this view, isn't just to help students find answers, but to help them understand why an answer is correct, and how to derive it themselves the next time.
Why Conceptual Understanding Still Matters
Proponents of this view argue that true conceptual understanding builds a kind of intellectual scaffolding — the ability to break down unfamiliar problems, connect ideas across topics, and reason through situations that don't perfectly match anything an AI model has been trained on. Artificial intelligence, by contrast, is fundamentally pattern-based: it excels at generating answers that resemble what it has seen before, but it does not "understand" a concept the way a human learner internalizes it through practice, mistakes, and gradual mastery.
Educators worry that if students lean too heavily on artificial intelligence tools during their formative learning years, they risk becoming proficient at prompting for answers rather than developing the reasoning skills that conceptual understanding is meant to build. This is particularly relevant for engineering and science students, where problem-solving ability — not just information recall — is what ultimately separates strong professionals from average ones.
The Role of Teachers in the AI Era
Rather than rejecting artificial intelligence outright, many educators, including those recognized for excellence in teaching, argue for a more balanced approach — one where technology supports learning but does not replace the teacher-student relationship that builds real conceptual understanding. In this framing, AI can be a useful tool for practice, exposure to varied problems, or quick clarification, but the deeper work of building intuition, questioning assumptions, and connecting ideas still requires guided human instruction.
This puts renewed emphasis on the role of teachers as facilitators of conceptual understanding, not just deliverers of information. In classrooms increasingly shaped by AI tools, the value a good teacher provides may shift — from being the primary source of facts, to being the guide who helps students genuinely understand what those facts mean and how to apply them.
A Broader Conversation in Indian Education
This concern isn't isolated to one professor or one institution. As artificial intelligence adoption accelerates across Indian schools, coaching centres, and universities, more educators are beginning to publicly discuss where the line should be drawn between using AI as a learning aid and over-relying on it in ways that undermine conceptual understanding. The recognition of educators like Professor Rath through national teaching awards may also reflect a broader institutional acknowledgment of this challenge — one that values pedagogy built on depth and reasoning, even as technology continues to reshape how students learn.
As Indian higher education continues to integrate AI tools at a rapid pace, this tension between speed and depth is likely to remain a central theme in conversations about the future of teaching and learning across the country's technical institutions.
